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Tag Archives: The Pillars of the Earth

One interesting historical exposition in The Pillars of the Earth is the nature of medieval taxation. A major source for taxation was through the milling of grain. With bread being the staple food, everyone needed flour and this opened up the door to a “broad-based tax.” It was simply made unlawful for anyone to privately grind one’s own grain. To comply with the law, you had to use the facility owned by the local lord, or local monastery, or whomever – the taxing agency. The miller could then extract a portion of the milled flour as payment for services and then such payment would be split with the “government” either as a fee for the license to operate the mill or, perhaps, a combination of that and the use of the government-owned facility.

It had something of an advantage, morally, of not being a taking. The user was simply paying a fee for services rendered. Force only came into play in that circumventing the requirement to use the government’s mill was subject to a fine that exceeded the cost of paying to have your grain milled in the first place, and this was far from voluntary. In the book, Prior Phillip (a main character) lectures a woman who is caught and fined for illicit milling of grain. She pleads that she is destitute and cannot afford the fine which, by the way, is why she didn’t pay the mill in the first place. What’s interesting is Phillip attaches no moral implications to evading the levy. He doesn’t tell her that it was her civic duty or her ethical obligation to pay her “fair share,” or that communal milling makes flour more economical for everyone. He does defend the necessity for (in this case) the monastery to raise money and that, while it is her natural right (my words, not his) to evade the taxation, when caught she shouldn’t complain about penalties that she knew full well in advance. The alternative, of course, is that she seek charity to obtain food when the cost of milling grain becomes prohibitive. The Prior acknowledges that breaking the law may be less debasing than begging for food, but that it is was her choice.

I, first of all, have to acknowledge that this is fiction. The words of the characters and even, perhaps, their circumstances are penned by an author of our present age. This should not be mistaken for medieval fact. Details may well reflect the sensibilities of our time rather than the reality of 850 years ago. That said, I do have some reflections on our duty to support government and how far we’ve come in recent generations.

It is true that, for the time covered by this novel, that the nobility generally couldn’t just show up at people’s doors and demand significant portions of their money. Even kings obtained their income through controlling particular governmental monopolies and “earning” the fees associated therewith. Local lords, in addition to such possible licenses, would typically own a significant portion of the land within their domain and, therefore, extract rent from those who actually worked the land. Like today’s rent, the cost of the rental is a combination of money for services rendered by the landowner, compensation to the landowner for (in the modern case) capital investment, and taxation. It gets hard to quantify but I think it is safe to say that tolerance for outright taxation was lower than what it is today.

Another angle to this is the accounting aspect – the ability of a lord and his ministers to keep track of all they needed to track to extract the tax in question. Applying a tax to “income” would have been difficult, if not impossible, in medieval times simply due to the required record-keeping. By way of contrast, head taxes (be they in the form of licenses or otherwise) or rents were doable, as they taxed static entities. Very specific levies, like taking a percentage of the profits from a single mill, could also be managed in that the monitoring required was discrete. One lord (or his agent) can keep some kind of track over the workings of a single mill. Doing the same for every non-farmer in a county, on the other hand, would have been impossible.

Today, of course, it is possible to monitor nearly every financial transaction that we enter into and each passing year we are getting nearer to the ability to track pretty much everything. In Europe, there is a concerted effort to stomp out cash and governments are likely going to resist Bitcoin-type economies, especially if they become widely popular. At the same time, our tolerance for ever higher taxes seems to grow in response to the demand for ever higher taxes.

Just to get a sense of where things are, in Denmark and France, taxation is approaching 50% of GDP. Even this significantly understates the level of taxation in those highest-taxed of nations. First of all, government spending is part of GDP, so if you make the assumption that all government spending ultimately has to source itself from taxation upon private incomes, the percentage will easily shoot into the 2/3rds or 3/4ths range. Also, taxation does not take into consideration compliance costs, some of which are directly equivalent to taxation. Requiring that a business spend X% of it’s income doing Y is, functionally, no different than taxing it X% and paying for Y from the government coffers. However, its not the absolute number we’re after here, but a relative one.

In the United States, we are close to the bottom of the OECD average. At 26% (Federal, State, and local combined), we are higher than only Korea, Turkey, Ireland, Chile, and Mexico (itself an interesting list). The OECD average is often used because, like the medieval feudal lords, undeveloped economies simply don’t have the sophistication to administer OECD-levels of taxation. America’s low rank in the list, and the significant gap below countries like Denmark, France, and Belgium, are cited as evidence that the U.S. can significantly increase taxes without damaging our economy. A more specific calculation of a desired tax level comes from looking at current spending. The Federal portion of that 26% tax take ranges around 17%, give or take a couple of percentage points. Analysts have calculated that it will be necessary to raise that to the 25-27% of GDP range in order to cover our deficit spending and “meet our obligations” going forward. That still wouldn’t make us France.

However, I’ve been fascinated with a chart I first saw a chart a couple of years ago that may be instructive. That 17% (give or take) has been constant since the Second World War. Before that, there were some wild gyrations during the Great Depression, of course, but tax rates were below 5%. It took the redirection the economic might of American against the Axis to bump us up to 20%+ before settling into our current band. What is amazing is that that 15-19% remains constant despite massive changes in tax rate policy through the years. In 1962, the top Federal Tax bracket rate was 90% and the Feds took 16.5% of GDP. In 1987, it was a post-WWII low of 29% and the Feds took 17.6%. So while tax policy, obviously, effects tax revenues, it is historically considerably less of an effect than one might surmise.

Finally, I note, that for the charts that also plot projections show the revenue percentage growing going forward, exceeding not only the historical trends but usually also the historical record. What are the chances that’s really going to happen?

To put it another way, what are the factors that have historically kept the U.S. tax rate near to constant, and what is changing about that, if anything? There is a mathematical portion of this equation that is somewhat independent of other factors. If we transition to a government that does more, that’s going to alter the relationship between tax rates and tax percentage of GDP, even with all else remaining equal. Remember, GDP includes government spend and, therefore, effectively includes the tax rate in the numerator and the denominator both. Simply shifting an economy from capitalist to socialist will require higher taxpayer rates just to maintain the same tax revenue percentage. But setting that aside, we have a cultural resistance that is part of keeping that tax take at 17% (even if that’s not how we perceive that limit). In medieval times, I have read, that a lord that took more than 10% from his subject would be considered tyrannical. I don’t know if that’s true, or even what that means given what I’ve said above, but do we have this hard limit of 20.5% that “the people” will fight if it is broken? Or is a big part of that limit technological? As government and “big data” is ever more capable of tracking every transaction, will that limit the ability of the “black market” to serve deterrent to ever-higher taxes.

Whatever it is that has held tax revenues steady is fighting an inevitable push from the other side. I’ve routinely seen a defense of a steady 3-5% increase in tax rates; Both that it is reasonable (in line with inflationary measures) and necessary (costs associated with government, such as health care and education, tend to grow faster than the economy as a whole). On the other hand, if you grow a percentage by 3-5% in perpetuity, it eventually hits 100%. Furthermore, at some point before it hits 100%, the “denominator” upon which that percentage is based starts to crumble and fall apart. There would seem to be some first-order math that would project a breaking point, at least far enough to tell the difference between “not in my lifetime” and “time to buy canned goods.”

The Pillars of the Earth has been great for these details of medieval life, which it integrates into the story so well. It has also been good as a novel – toward the end, I was driven to get to the “whodunnit” answer that remained throughout the book. I also, as I wrote earlier, have been impressed with its integration of the fictional story with the grand history of England. At the end, it is the Thomas Becket’s service as Archbishop of Canterbury that entwines with the story of our fictional builders and their Cathedral to propel this chapter to its conclusion.

For the Siege of Belgrade, the pitched battle was depicted by showing (effectively) still shots of the major characters accompanied by waves of blood splashing across the screen. It was not tasteful, nor pleasant.

I do give the show some credit, though. They tried to balance portrayal on screen of both the goings-on within the royal palace and with Suleiman and his court in the field. This requires somehow portraying a massive army on the march and huge battles, all on a TV-series budget. They did try.

The other effect that smacked me across the head is one that I’ve seen before in 80s shows (or maybe it was 90s. The Sharpe series is one that springs to mind). Magnificent Century‘s use of electric guitar to score a period drama is also not a good production choice. To me, it made the show seem at least 20 years older than it is.

I’m also surprised at how thoroughly the soap-opera plot has grabbed me. The episodes tend to have cliff-hanger endings, particularly when it comes to the conflicts between the various female main characters. I find myself craving to find out how the latest cat fight is going to turn out. It is embarrassing to admit it, but it is true.

I’m also continuing on withThe Pillars of The Earth, and this is a story that seems to snowball in intensity as a rolls along. Where I had started with reading a handful of pages at a go, I now find myself staying up to all hours to advance from chapter to chapter. I also notice the author pulling in more and more of the significant events of the time period, directly linking them to his narrative. Maybe a bit obviously, the White Ship plays an active role in the story.

In another part of the story, our hero finds himself working that the Toledo School of Translators, whose existence I only recently became aware by having watched The Day the Universe Changed. The flood of Greek scholarship that flowed from the completion of the Reconquista and the subsequent Western access to Muslim libraries is a tremendous event in the development of Western Civilization. It is also one that I really was unaware of until I saw it in the TV series. As The Pillars of the Earth wanders around Europe a bit, the story begins to feel every bigger and bigger.

Likewise I soldier on withBlood and Beauty. It may be a mistake to read this particular book intermittently. Each time I come back to it after reading something else, the disorientation of present-tense narrative returns in full force. As always, I get used to it after a while, but at first I feel less human for having read this style of prose.

As I get further into this book, I realize that details of Blood and Beauty and the details in Borgia come pretty close to each other. I don’t think one used the other as a source. Rather, I suspect that they both have relied on the same, or at least similar, contemporary histories. Even in some cases where the story is different, you can see how one has made a slightly different interpretation of the knowns and unknowns than the other. Who killed Juan Borgia? In Blood and Beauty, we know it is not Cesare because the narrative of the book has access to his inner thoughts. We also know it is not Lucrezia, because her motive (the killing of commoner and confidant Pedro) doesn’t occur until after the killing of Juan. In the book, however, it is clearly shown how history will fault Cesare once other bodies pile up. Once you start killing one of your own relatives, it stands to reason that you’d be willing to kill another.

One surprise in Blood and Beauty is the prominent featuring of syphilis to the story. It is particularly potent here, at least to me, because unlike the characters in the book we are aware of both its transmissible and its potentially fatal consequences. In the book, a surprising number of major characters struggle with the disease. On TV, they were merely made gay.

The phenomenon that is The Pillars of the Earth was in my consciousness long before I knew what it was about. It is a book, a TV show, a game, another game, and more.

I had probably heard of the book because of the miniseries. I must have noticed somewhere a marketing push that mentioned it was dramatizing “Ken Follett’s best-selling novel.” I didn’t watch any of it and didn’t really pick up much about the content. It sounded kind of soap-opera-ish to me. I imagined the grand miniseries interpretations of novels from the 1970s and really had no desire to go there. I didn’t know who Ken Follett was besides his, apparently, being a best-selling author. I didn’t know what these pillars were, when the story took place, or really anything about the setting of the novel.

Move forward a half-a-decade and I found myself trying to find a good board game that dealt with medieval economies. The Pillars of the Earth popped up in my search. I was confused. First, because I think I was constantly mixing up The Pillars of the Earth with Pillars of Eternity. The latter is a fantasy RPG, itself based on a science fiction novel from the early 80s (predating, for what its worth, The Pillars of the Earth). To add to the confusion, the success of the Pillars of Eternity computer game spun off some board games based on that theme. None of that seemed particularly medieval or economic.

That got me to realize, no, this is not a D&D type thing, its that romantic mini-series from 2010, and that left me even more befuddled. How to you take a miniseries romance (remember, I’ve got The Thorn Birds or North and South in my mind’s eye) and turn it into a board game, much less one that simulates the medieval economy. Nevertheless, this is one of the better-rated games on Board Game Geek and stands out amongst some pretty good company, particularly within the strategy game subcategory. So I began to look at some pictures of the game in motion.

I was genuinely taken by surprise to see a game about building a cathedral. The players cooperate (while competing for points) in the construction of a grand church in 13th Century England. Game pieces represent workers, resources, and a miniature cathedral that is built up over the course of the game. Where is Richard Chamberlain? Where is Patrick Swayze? Not that it is the lack of romantic situations that deter me, but for whatever reason, even though the game looks really nice I’ve never felt the urge to give it a play.

Another couple of years pass, and now I have a copy of the novel available to me. I started with the forward and was again surprised to see that see that, in a very fundamental way, this really is a book about building a cathedral!

Author Follett had long taken an interest in cathedrals. As a young man, he had read a book called An Outline of European Architecture which talked about the invention of the pointed arch. This technical innovation allowed taller churches to be built but also created the beauty which we identify with the Gothic cathedrals. Shortly thereafter he had the opportunity to visit the cathedral at Peterborough and, from that point on, visiting, studying, and admiring cathedrals became a hobby for him.

Before he had even written his first best seller (Eye of the Needle), he had proposed a medieval novel along the lines of The Pillars of the Earth. His agent said the concept was not ready and, in retrospect, the author agrees that he, as a writer, was not mature enough to complete the project. It would be another decade before he again proposed the Pillars concept which, by now, was greeted with trepidation because he was well established as a “spy novel” writer. This time he persisted and the rest, you might say in more ways than one, is history.

So at its foundations (!), this novel is very different than what I’ve long expected. Of course, if you simply skip over the preface and dive into the story, perhaps without any preconceived notions about Ken Follett or the themes of the book, what you have is a fairly solid piece of historical fiction. Focus is on the characters and interpersonal drama. Like good historical fiction, the story illuminates life in the middle ages in a way that informs the reader. Reading the book, it doesn’t seem to be “about” the building of a cathedral, at least not in the straightforward way that its genesis might imply.

He does talk about the art, architecture, and engineering of cathedral building. He doesn’t delve into the technology to a level of detail that it drags on the story, but it is there. Also included are the concepts of how a medieval economy works, showing how the cathedral is financed and the ways in that the town prospers as a result. I have in my mind a particular section where the abundant availability of semi-skilled labor creates a shortage of non-skilled laborers – a problem that in the book a character overcomes by inventing an automated machine to perform the labor. It’s a bit of economics that is as least as relevant to the here and now as it was to medieval England.

But the book is also about the cast of characters whose lives come together around the project of building a cathedral. It shows details of working-class life, from food to culture to what makes up a productive life. It also describes some details of combat, in particular small-scale encounters between no more than a handful of combatants. In addition, though, the book describes the Battle of Lincoln as witnessed by several of the major characters, with one as an active participant.

I Have Taken the King

The anchoring historical fact of The Pillars of the Earth‘s historical fiction is the period of the English monarchy known as The Anarchy. This was a succession crisis that followed the untimely death of the heir to Henry I in 1120. While Henry would reign for another 15 years, he did not sire another legitimate son. Henry favored his daughter Maude (or Matilda*) as his heir, but after he was gone, many of his barons backed his nephew Stephen. Maude’s marriage to Geoffrey the Count of Anjou combined with the historical fact that a woman had never inherited the throne of England gave the nobles of England cause to choose Stephen over Henry’s daughter. Add to that, Stephen was a good-looking and likeable fellow who easily won support. Maude was difficult to like. Her campaign to claim the throne was supported by her half-brother (an illegitimate son of Henry) Robert of Gloucester and some assumed that he would be the real power behind Maude’s rule.

Following several years of civil war, during the winter of 1141, Stephen had moved his army to Lincoln to besiege the castle there and eject its occupiers who, themselves, were contesting Stephen’s award of the Earldom seated in that city. While undertaking the siege, Stephen received word of an approaching army commanded by Robert of Gloucester, an army that was a near-equal to his own.

Per The Pillars of the Earth, Stephen’s advisers suggested he simply abandon the siege (which was of trivial strategic value) and forgo fighting Maude’s army in open battle unless he had a clear advantage. Stephen’s sense of chivalry compelled him to engage in the evenly-matched fight that presented itself, even dismounting his own knights so as to face the dismounted entourage of Gloucester on a fair basis. Other accounts suggest that the odds were clearly against Stephen but that he fought anyway, against common sense and advise to the contrary.

I took the opportunity of the now-ubiquitous black Friday cybersales to buy the Field of GloryBattle Pack for a mere buck-and-a-quarter (U.S.). Among the 24 scenarios, spread across the range of Field of Glory‘s expansive coverage, is a representation of the Battle of Lincoln. It also includes (for what its worth) the Battle of the Standard, which had taken place three years earlier between Stephen and the Scots in a sort of adjunct to the succession civil war.

The Battle of Lincoln scenario is of interest to me for a couple of reasons. First off, of course, is that I play it at the same time I’m reading Follett’s description of the battle. But as a Field of Glory scenario, I am interested in the fact that this is an official release. That is, it is part of a package that costs real money. I will expect balanced scenarios that also play well with the AI and the scoring system as opposed to the best effort of a fan.

With this scenario, it does match the FoG template better than a lot of the user-made scenarios. It is on the smaller side (and maybe even seems more so because user-scenario-designers love to go big). The battle is fought on relatively clear terrain. I’m also relieved to see no odd quirks of terrain used to shoehorn some aspect of the battle into a non-cooperating game engine.

I spot the banner of Usurper King Stephen across the field of battle.

I take command Empress Maude’s army because that’s default setup. I was tempted to side with King Stephen because, knowing he actually lost the real battle, he would seem to be the underdog. It is also from the perspective of his side of the field that we view the battle in The Pillars of the Earth. However, he does have a larger army to start (in the book, it is due to the timely arrival of fictional antagonist William Hamleigh with a small force). I’ve also learned the hard way that the default designation of sides for Player and AI often is an indication of which side will be easier to play for the programmed opponent.

Both sides are close to breaking. Stephen bodyguard is also at the verge of collapse with Stephen himself having fallen.

I’ve not seen too much detail about the battle so I can’t comment too deeply on whether the game play had historical fidelity. Like the description in the book, the fight ultimately came down to the center as the two wings fell into chaos. One contrast to the book is it looks, in that last screenshot, that King Stephen himself may have fallen in battle. Or maybe he was just hit on the head with a rock. I’ve said it before that the Field of Glory engine only indicates the “loss” of a commander without specifically saying whether it is due to death, injury, or capture. The result, above, may just be a mirroring of the historical outcome where the battle came to an end with the capture of Stephen and the shout from William de Keynes (equally appropriate during a tense chess tournament), “Hither, all of you come hither! I have taken the king!”

*King Stephen’s wife was also Matilda (Matilda of Boulogne) and continued to fight Maude/Matilda after Stephen’s capture, ultimately securing his release in an exchange for Robert of Gloucester.